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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/24907
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/24907
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

You may or may not be able to pull this off, but this is the danger you face: You may end up writing scenes that you fall in love with as scenes but which do not fit the arc of your story.

Robert McKee describes this as one of the great pitfalls of story, and of revision. The first draft of a script or a novel ends up with a few good scenes and a lot of drek. The writer then throws out the drek, keeps the good scenes, and tries again. They may write a few more good scenes, but what they end up with is a set of scenes that do not follow a coherent story arc. Because they are in love with the good individual scenes they find it very difficult to remove any of them from the story, and therefore are never able to build a coherent story arc. They end up with a collection of miscellaneous scenes and no story.

The danger of falling into this trap seems much higher if you write scenes out of order. Someone with a very disciplined vision of their story arc may be able to pull this off, but I think that no matter how much of a planner you are, you discover things in the course of the writing that change the direction of a story by some greater or lesser amount. If you have already written later scenes that you are in love with, the temptation to turn the path of the story to pass through those pre-written scenes will be very strong.

Original score: 6